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Comment by sieve | Hacker News Reader

I installed this the moment I got my Kobo Libra H2O. Mostly read fiction from the 1800s and early 1900s and I did not want to fight whatever proprietary software the reader came with (Kobo is probably better than the Kindle for this, but I never tried it!)

I have a problem with epubs though. This need to support every single thing under the sun makes the pipeline exceedingly complex. All you need for a vast majority of fiction is:

- headings

- paras

- emphasis (bold/italic)

- block quotes

Add simple "image" syntax to it to display maps etc from detective stories

Basically a ruthlessly cut down version of markdown.

The mini-readers from Xteink came in at the right time for such experimentation.

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Kobo's reader definitely renders Epubs better than KOReader. I really only used it on my Kobo Libre H20 to download epubs from my calibre server. Now, on my Boox Go 7, KOReader beats the built-in reader hands down

Fiction from the 1800s? Now that sounds interesting. Can you name three titles that you would recommend? And: how did you get into this? Doesn’t sound like a TikTok trend, haha.

Not them, but I read Moby Dick last year. Man, I felt like I'd been lied to. It's kind of a laughing stock reference to giant old-timey books that were famous for being famous and such. So wrong! It was hilarious in parts. The narrator is a complete smartass with a strong bend to irony. I loved every bit of it, even the (in)famous chapters about whaling and knot tying and all that, which were vivid peeks into worlds I didn't know existed.

Melville's "Bartleby" is very good

I'm not familiar with it, which makes me want to add it to the reading stack.

> Can you name three titles that you would recommend?

I can recommend some authors from the period: W Somerset Maugham, Thomas Hardy, Anthony Trollope, H Rider Haggard, Wilkie Collins, Saki, Maupassant, O Henry.

Dickens, Hugo, Austen, Eliot, Bronte, Wilde, Doyle, Poe, Melville, Verne, Stevenson, Wells, Christie, Chesterton, Burroughs, Lovecraft, Chekhov, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy etc are probably well-known.

The list could go on forever, almost. Some books might feel dated (or too long). But that is fine.

> how did you get into this?

I started reading when I was 3-4 and never stopped. We moved to the suburbs when I was 7-8 (late 80s) and there wasn't much else to do outside of school except read. Built a physical library of close to 4,000 books along the way, but I mostly read at the computer or on e-devices

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